Monday, August 6, 2012

No Future in the Bible

Psalm 22 "decoded"

Back in 1997, an enterprising
journalist named Michael Drosnin published a book claiming that the Bible
contained a complex code, describing events that took place long after the
texts were actually written.Called The Bible Code, the book was a best
seller that captured the imagination of millions.

For the deeply religious, the book
“proved” that the Bible was truly God’s word.

You haven’t heard much about it
lately, have you?

That’s because the Bible Code was
used to make predictions.Not one of
them has come true.Moreover, scholars
examining the text found basic flaws in the logic behind the code, which looks
plausible, but really isn’t.

The code involved arranging all 304,805
Hebrew letters of the Bible into a matrix without spaces or punctuation – in
short, the way the original text was written.Then, a computer looked for matches that created words.The work was done in original Hebrew, but
it’s easy to understand.Take any quote
from the Bible, look for letters in a row that form words.

One published example drew on
Genesis 31:28 And hast not
suffered me to kiss my sons and my daughters? Thou hast now done foolishly in
so doing.

daughtersthouhastnowdonefoolishlyinsodoing.

See?You end up with Roswell, the site of the supposed UFO landing in 1947.

Some of the words are uncovered by
going in a straight line, but others can come from other lines above, below or
next to each other.

Unfortunately, you can do the same
thing with any book or even this essay.With enough letters,
you can spell anything.In reality, the
code is nonsense.

So is the idea that the Bible
predicts anything.In reality, that idea
stems from a mistaken use of the word “prophet.”In modern parlance, that’s someone who
predicts the future, like Cassandra of ancient Troy who could see the future
but was doomed to be ignored.

Nostradamus

History is replete with such
prophets, including Jeanne Dixon in this country and France’s Nostradamus (left). Their
success records were extraordinarily tiny.You could achieve better results by flipping a coin.

Biblical prophets were no
better.More importantly, those folks
were not looking into the misty future, but relaying (at least in their mind) the
word of God.They were mouthpieces for
the deity and threatened listeners.Their point was that if God was not observed, bad things would happen.That’s not much of a prediction: bad things
happened all the time to impoverished people tiptoeing on the knife’s edge
between foreign armies, starvation and disease.

The idea linking these prophets with
prophecy owes its existence to Christian exegesis.After the formation of Christianity,
apologists scoured the only holy texts they knew, the ones now in the Bible,
and plucked predictions of Jesus from the musty pages.Any mention of a messiah was culled as were
predictions meant for a distant time period.

For example, Isaiah said: Isaiah
7:14."Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a young
woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel."(7:14) Isaiah was talking about his time
period and not the Christmas story.To
early Christians, the prediction was too appealing to pass up.

The connection is tenuous at best:
Mary was supposedly a virgin, and Jesus’ name was not Immanuel.

Regardless, once the Jewish Bible was
seen to predict Jesus, all seemingly prophetic comments were turned to forecasts.

Lindsey

Predictions have rolled along ever
since.They are inevitably wrong.For example, conservative Christian icon Hal Lindsey (right) is still living off
his 1970 book predicting the Russia would soon invade Israel and precipitate World
War III.Today, he says he got the date
wrong.

Prophets in the past had the good
sense to couch their predictions with conditional words like “could” and
“may.”Invariably, if they made a
prediction after the event took place, they were always right.A predication made before an event was
invariably wrong, just like the Bible Code.

Using the Bible as anything more
than to initiate conversations about morals and ethics is equally mistaken.

Long-time
religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious
history.He also speaks at various
religious organizations throughout Florida.You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.net.He is the author of the famed Unauthorized
Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel
Writers Get Their Information; Noel:
The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols;and Dummies Guide to Comparative
Religion.His books are available on Amazon.com,
Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.He can also be followed on Twitter.

You
can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at
http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

About Me

During his career, Bill has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, advertising copywriter and writer/editor of NASCAR programs, among other jobs. He has won three international awards for stories and programs while working for International Speedway Corp. and was named 2000 Florida Feature Writer of the Year.
He has published four books to date and his writing has appeared in hundreds of local, regional, state and national publications.